Hillary Wins, So She Don’t Care

Posted by LK on 4/23/08 • Categorized as Politics

Readers know that I prefer Obama to Clinton, and either of them to “100 year” McCain. Anyone with a cable or internet connection knows that she whupped him by around 10 percentage points yesterday in PA. She won this battle, which may well play a role in the Dems losing the war. Her self-righteous and self-serving proclamations about it not being over ’til it’s over, and every voice being heard, are transparent signs of power hunger, not public spirit. There’s no denying yesterday’s victory, and there’s no denying the quicksand is better off for it.

As the talking heads droned on and on last night with divisive statistics that made this country look like the United Demographics of America while discussing with great fervor the meaning of meaningless details, no one I heard came up with a succinct list of why she plunges on, despite every analyst armed with numbers and a touchscreen pointing out that she can’t win the pledged delegate race.

I’ve got four reasons, none of them savory, with the fourth being so dark, and relating to the fate of exceptional paradigm changing individuals, that it’s a sleeping dog I’ll let lie for now. Here are the other three:

1. She’s hanging in there waiting for another major Obama gaffe, a la the Reverend Wrong and Bittergate. Schadenfreude as a campaign tactic far more valuable than a forward thinking policy paper.

2. She’s hoping that the superdelegates overturn the popular vote, something she would rail against were she ahead in the pledged delegate count. Why not just come right out a say “yeah, it looks like a democracy, but that’s only because the folks in make-up do a damn good job with the aristocrats”.

3. Her legal beagles haven’t yet completed and submitted their oxymoronic thousand page briefs about including the botched primaries in Michigan and Florida by using some arcane and arbitrary formula that once again, she’d be railing against if Obama was the one with the flawed and illegitimate victories.

And yet, following this victory, the time isn’t right to demand that she step down. Last week might have been, and perhaps following defeats in Indiana and North Carolina the party elders, as incompetent and impotent as they’ve been up until this point, can justifiably demand an end to a process that delays the inevitable and hurts the party’s chances come the general election.

Don’t hold your breath hoping that happens. It’s getting even uglier out there.